We're Shifting to "Social Support"

We changed our support interface recently using the system from desk.com – it goes from static pages where users navigate by product to a search driven page with a constantly evolving knowledge base. Both Voltaic and our customers can contribute to the knowledge base.

Our goals in implementing the system were:
1. Align our support with how customers view our products — we’re trying to help people power their devices, not sell 4 Watt solar chargers
2. Allow our customers and potential customers to get accurate answers, faster
3. Reduce the amount of work we need to do! – hopefully, we can eliminate some of the inquiries that are simple, but take time to respond to
4. Make it easier to scale up our support team – right now, everything is managed by one person (mostly me) answering every tech support email. I love solving customer problems, but I’d like to be able to share that responsibility better.
4. SEO? – people are charging all sorts of different electronics. Maybe, by answering a large range of questions publicly in clear and precise manner, other people will Google similar terms and we’ll get more people coming to our site and learning about Voltaic. We’ll see.

My fear of course is that we open ourselves up a bit as well for when people are dissatisfied with one of our products. I don’t expect this to be an issue, and it provides good motivation to keep trying to make the best products we can and providing top-notch customer service. The second concern is the quality of the search on desk.com – what if someone searches for info on how to charge a MacBook and they get information on battery storage? We hope desk.com makes big strides here because that could be more frustrating than not having the search at all.

We chose desk.com over zendesk and getsatisfaction. We liked the customer interface of desk.com over the other entrants (clean, easy to use, fast). Zendesk had a much better email interface for customer responses, but it felt much more clunky in other ways. Try out the system now and ask us a question privately or, even better, publicly.